Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

merge in a darkly carnivalesque ending. Indeed, no other contemporary novelist could have written this satirical masterpiece, and few could have gotten away with such blatant attacks on China’s love affair with exotic foods and predilection for excessive consumption, not to mention egregious exploitation of the peasantry.
    As the new millennium approached, Mo Yan once again undertook to inscribe his idiosyncratic interpretation of China’s modern history, this time incorporating nearly all of the twentieth century, a bloody century in China by any standard. Had he been a writer of lesser renown, one bereft of the standing, talent, and international visibility that served as a protective shield, he might well not have been able to withstand the withering criticism that followed the 1996 publication of his biggest novel to date (nearly a half million words in the original version, a “book as thick as a brick,” in his own words),
Big Breasts and Wide Hips.
This novel, with its eroticism and, in the eyes of some, inaccurate portrayal of modern China’s political landscape, would have sparked considerable controversy had it simply appeared in the bookstores. But when, after its serialized publication (1995) in a major literary magazine,
Dajia
, it was awarded the first Dajia Prize of 100,000 renminbi (roughly $12,000), the outcry from conservative critics was immediate and shrill. The judges for this nongovernmental prize had the following to say about a novel that its supporters have called a “somber historical epic”:
    Big Breasts and Wide Hips
is a sumptuous literary feast with a simple, straightforward title. In it, with undaunted perseverance and passion, Mo Yan has narrated the historical evolution of Chinese society in a work that covers nearly the entire twentieth century…. It is a literary masterpiece in the author’s distinctive style.
    The judges took note of the author’s skillful alternation of first-and third-person narration and his use of flashback and other deft writing techniques. As for the arresting title, Mo Yan wrote in a 1995 essay that the “creative urge came from his deep admiration for his mother and … the inspiration [for] the title was derived from his experience of seeing an ancient stone sculpture of a female figure with protruding breasts and buttocks.” 5 That did not still his critics, for whom concerns over his evocation of the female anatomy were of lesser consequence than his treatment of China’s modern history.
    While the novel opens on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War (1936), with the birth of the central male character, Shangguan Jintong, and his twin sister, the narration actually begins in time (chapter 2) at the turn of the century, in the wake of the failed Boxer Rebellion, in which troops from eight foreign nations crushed an indigenous, anti-foreign rebellion and solidified their presence in China. As in Mo Yan’s earlier novel,
Red Sorghum
, the central, and in many ways defining, events occur during the eight years of war with Japan, all on Chinese soil. For Mo Yan, the earlier decades, while not peaceful by any means, are notable for personal, rather than national, events. It is the time of Mother’s childhood, marriage, and the birth of her first seven children — all daughters and all by men other than her sterile husband. The national implications become clear when Mother’s only son, Jintong, arrives, the offspring of Swedish Malory, the alien “Other.”
    The bulk of the novel then takes the reader through six turbulent decades, from the Sino-Japanese War, in which two defending factions (Mao’s Communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists) fought one another almost as much as they fought, and usually succumbed to, the Japanese. It is here that Mo Yan has particularly angered his critics, in that he has created heroes and turncoats that defy conventional views, resulting in a “sycophantic, shameless work that turns history upside down, fabricates lies, and glorifies the Japanese fascists and the Landlord Restoration Corps [groups of landed individuals who went over to Nationalist-controlled areas after the War when their land was redistributed by the Communists],” in the words of one critic. Of the several male figures in the novel, excluding the foreigner, whose “potency” cannot save him and stigmatizes his offspring, one is a patriot-turned-collaborator, another is a leader of Nationalist forces, and two are Communists (a